Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Israel’s War with the Muslim Brotherhood

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Despite the cries of furious hipsters waving cardboard signs stained with fake blood, there is no ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza. No more than there was when the US began bombing the Taliban.

The last act of ethnic cleansing took place in the summer of 2005 when the Israeli government gave in to international pressure by forcibly evicting all the Jews from the Gaza Strip. Even the graves were dug up.

The media, which had been up in arms when Israel had evicted 400 Hamas terrorists, had nothing but applause for the forced ethnic cleansing of thousands of Jewish families. The synagogues they left behind were also torched to the applause of the same media now filling the airwaves with fake outrage.

CNN described one synagogue as “very controversial because it is the Jewish synagogue.” The Los Angeles Times wrote of Muslims venting “their fury over the occupation by laying waste to the synagogues.” “Youths set fire to synagogues and other symbols of the hated occupation,” the London Times scribbled. The Age tried for the poetic with “Burning synagogue lights Gaza dawn”.

The Nazi Minister of Propaganda had written under similar circumstances, “I wish to return to my hotel and see a glow as red as blood. The synagogue is burning.” The mainstream media had erased any distinction between themselves and the Kristallnacht propaganda of Joseph Goebbels

The ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza made the Hamas takeover possible. The current conflict is rooted in that tragic act of appeasement.

And it wasn’t only the Jews who suffered.

Under Muslim Brotherhood rule, the Christian population of Gaza was cut in half. The Baptists nearly disappeared after a Christian bookstore was bombed twice and its manager was clubbed and shot.

What happened to the Christians of Gaza was the same thing that had been happening to Christians across the Middle East under Islamic rule. While the media is focusing on Gaza, ISIS has just finished ethnically cleansing the Christians of Mosul by demanding that the non-Muslim residents of this Iraqi city convert to Islam, pay Jizya or die.

ISIS is a cousin of Hamas. Both organizations are outgrowths of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man originally behind Al Qaeda in Iraq, was released from a Jordanian prison to win favor with the local Muslim Brotherhood.

When Zarqawi was finally killed, Hamas issued a statement mourning him as “a martyr of the nation.” Protesters in Gaza demanded revenge for his death. The Islamic Action Front, the Brotherhood’s political arm in Jordan, openly expressed its admiration for the mass murderer.

ISIS, Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood have all driven out Christians in areas under the control of their Jihadists. Hamas’ attacks on Israel are motivated by that same xenophobic impulse.

Hamas is doing to Gaza what ISIS is doing to Mosul, slowly transforming it into a terrorist slum at war with the rest of the world, until it becomes a Qaeda, a base, the Muslim equivalent of a Liberation Theology base community.

Christians, Jews and other minorities cannot survive this process. Their only choices are to flee or fight.

When Israel pulls back after this latest round of fighting, Gaza will be as Muslim as ever. But under Hamas rule, it will not be very long until it is as empty of Christians as it already is of Jews.

And that is real ethnic cleansing.

Genocide isn’t the empty theater played out by Hamas and its media and social media allies. It isn’t terrorist groups launching rockets using human shields and then palming off scenes from Final Destination 4 as Israeli atrocities.

It’s the eradication of an entire minority population. It’s what happens when synagogues and churches vanish and are replaced by mosques.

The ultimate goal of Hamas is envisioned in Article Seven of its charter which looks forward to the genocide of the Jews when “The Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!’”

Or as the Secretary General of the Muslim Brotherhood had already proclaimed long ago, “The Zionist question is but a Jewish question with all that the word entails.”

Unlike Israel’s surgical strikes at Hamas assets, this is genocide and it is the regional endgame of the Arab Muslim conquerors and colonists.

Hamas is not a persecuted minority lashing out as its oppressors. It is one outpost of a supremacist Sunni Muslim majoritarian organization that is terrorizing minorities across the region. Its mission is to continue the thousand year project of Islamic colonialism to destroy indigenous cultures and religions.

The Jews of Jerusalem, like the Christians of Mosul, happen to be in the way. Hamas’s charter makes its genocidal mission clear. But every Islamist group whose mission is to impose the absolute rule of Islam is equally committed to the ethnic cleansing of non-Muslim and even Muslim populations.

The real genocide in Gaza and throughout the Middle East is being committed by Muslims against non-Muslims with the complicity of Western media and governments. There were no UN resolutions when Jews were ethnically cleansed from Kfar Darom in Gaza and parts of Jerusalem in 1948 by Muslims.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s battalion attacked the village of Kfar Darom and forty-five Israeli militia members protected 400 men, women and children. The Brotherhood’s attacks were beaten back with determined resistance until its Jihadists were forced to retreat leaving behind seventy of their dead.

After the village came under attack from Egyptian armor and air power, it had to be abandoned for decades until Israel liberated the territory on which it had stood. Then the diplomats and reporters who hadn’t cared about the tiny village before, suddenly declared that Kfar Darom was a settlement and the Jews who lived there were occupiers for resettling the land that Muslims had conquered in 1948.

When Kfar Darom was ethnically cleansed again in 2005, the media and the diplomats cheered. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar entered the Kfar Darom synagogue and laid claim to it in the name of Islam.

There were no resolutions or boycotts when the Jews were forced out of East Jerusalem in 1948 and the Jewish Quarter was blown up by a Muslim commander who said, “For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter.” But when Israel liberated and reunited Jerusalem in 1967, the Jews moving into their own city and one of the oldest cities in the world were denounced as “settlers.”

The international principle that has been adopted universally is that when Muslims conquer a place, it belongs to them permanently, even if they only conquered it a few decades ago. Muslims always have superior rights to Christians, Jews or any other non-Muslim group in their own countries or any country.

This principle acknowledges that that the ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS or Hamas is legitimate. It enshrines Muslim privilege up to and including the point of genocide. While the media wails over Gaza, Muslim campaigns of ethnic cleansing continue in Syria, Nigeria and Iraq and a dozen other places.

Israel has become a flashpoint in the region because it is the only place where an armed non-Muslim minority has been able to make a stand against Muslim genocide. Israel has been fighting the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza since right after the Holocaust. Its soldiers are fighting so that the same forces that have been ethnically cleansing the Christians and Jews of the Middle East do not reach Israel.